The White Lord Quetzalcoatl and
the Hopi True White Brother
I’ve been pretty skeptical of the whole return of Quetzalcoatl myth (Who was Quetzalcoatl? ). Since the Christian missionaries burned almost all the books, texts like the Books of Chilam Balam in the Yucatan were written in Latin characters after the missionaries arrived. Prophesies in these books were spoken by Jaguar priests, the Chilam Balam, in a trance state, and written down by scribes. They were certainly influenced by the missionaries and perhaps every altered outright in an attempt to persuade the Maya to accept the new religion. Consider this quote from the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel: ‘There is a sign of almighty God on high. The raised wooden cross shall come. It shall be displayed to the world that the world may be enlightened… Receive your guests, the bearded men, the men of the east, the bearers of the sign of God.’
It is from these books, and a text complied by a Franciscan monk interviewing indigenous people called the Florentine Codex, that we read of Quetzalcoatl’s promised return. Like the Historic Jesus and the post-Easter Christ, there is a historic Quetzalcoatl and a Quetzalcoatl God-man. The historic Quetzalcoatl was born of a virgin birth in 947 AD, became a Toltec ruler who preached peace and outlawed human sacrifice, and was sacrificed himself after religious high priests plotted against him. The God Quetzalcoatl, like the Christ, was present when the cosmos was formed. Originally, Quetzalcoatl was one of four directional Gods associated with the four cardinal directions and with wind and rain. He was the white God of the West, as his father had been. He is credited with giving mankind corn, science, the calendar, and arts, and is the God of civilization.
Montezuma was stymied in the defense of his Aztec capital, perhaps due to the belief, or at least suspicion, that the invader Hernán Cortés was Quetzalcoatl returning. Whether this was true or not Cortés seemed to believe it, and included the claim in his letters. Mesoamericans did not have beards, and if there had been a prophecy of bearded white men arriving from the east, Cortés certainly would have looked the part. It’s possible of course that missionaries made this up totally from whole cloth, or that pre-conquest Chilam Balam prophecies were made at a time of Spanish colonization of the Caribbean. The Mayans are now known to have been sea traders, and stories of these bearded men and their new religion may have been known to them. Cabel-chen, whose prophecy included “Receive your guests, the bearded men, the men of the east, the bearers of the sign of God” is known to have lived shortly before the conquest.
It has been suggested that dates in the Chilam Balam books were altered by the Spanish to reflect the view that Cortés and his invading army were in fact the anticipated bearded men carrying the wooden cross of the true God that the Mayans were supposed to welcome (remember that the cross was the same shape as the World Tree, the symbol of the Mayan religion). The missionaries did indeed make an effort to switch Jesus for Quetzalcoatl, Kukulcan in the Mayan language. The books are long, however, and both the calendar calculations and the language is complex. The resulting books contain a mix of dates.
American linguist and archeologist Alfred M Tozzer wrote “these prophecies were adapted by the Spanish to proselytizing purposes but they seem fundamentally to have been native accounts of the return of Kulkulcan.” Writer Michael John Wells Finley has written “Cabal-chen is unequivocally associated with katun 13 Ahaw, when the Spanish in fact arrived in the Yucatan. This is interesting because elsewhere in the Books of Chilam Balam, the return of Kulkulcanis identified with katun 4 Ahaw. It is possible that, under missionary influence, the authors of the Books not only substituted the Christian God for Kulkulcan, but also shifted the katun to which the prophecy originally applied.”
Katun 4 Ahaw, of course, is the Mayan day on our December 21, 2012. I became less skeptical of these prophecies after my time recently on the Hopi reservation. As I have written, there is reason to believe the Hopi and the Maya are ancestrally related (Maya and Hopi). The Hopi also have a prophecy of the return of a lost ‘white brother’ who will come at the end of the age. In Book of the Hopi, Frank Waters writes “the coming of the Hopi’s lost white brother, Pahána, like the return of the Maya’s bearded white god Kukulcan, the Toltecan and Aztecan Quetzalcoatl, was a myth so common throughout all pre-Columbian America that we can regard it as arising from a concept rooted in the unconscious. Whatever its symbolic meaning, the event was long hailed by prophecy.”
Pahána is the True White Brother. The first white man seen by the Hopi was the Spaniard Pedro de Tovar, which they, perhaps like Montezuma, suspected might be the subject of their prophecy. The Hopi quickly ascertained that these white men were not the True White Brother, and knew they were in for trouble. When the prophecies are retold today, it is pointed out that Pahána will not behave like other white men. He will come at the end of this forth world, when the Blue Star Kachina removes his mask in public so that uninitiated children can see his face. They believe he will come at a time of global conflict. He possesses the corner of a broken tablet given to the Fire Clan 1000 years ago by the Lord of this world Massaw, and this is one way they will know him. They will give him the remaining tablets of Massaw and he will rule the day of purification, and prepare for the next world. It is also written, however, ‘Our White brother might come and find we have forsaken the sacred laws and instructions; then he will whip us without mercy’ (The Hopi Survival Kit, by Reverend Thomas Mails).
The Mayans and the Hopi share white as the color of their north cardinal point, and for the Aztecs, white was the color associated with the west. Quetzalcoatl was an Aztec rain god, a white god of the west. I find the Hopi prophecy, an ancient oral prophecy, much more convincing than books written during an occupation and edited my missionaries trying to destroy one ancient religion and replace it with another. Could the white men prophesized by the Hopi and the Mayans not refer to skin color at all, but an ancient tradition of wind and rain from a white cardinal direction that once was the very gift of life itself? I have a funny feeling that when Pahána finally arrives, he will look nothing like me.